Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City
By Stella Dong
Morrow; 352 pp.; $ 27.50

No one can adequately describe the turmoil, decadence, moral squalor, beauty, energy and sheer joie de vivre of historic Shanghai. It is simply too diverse, colorful and contradictory for one human author to capture. In this book, however, Stella Dong succeeds in telling a very readable, provocative and exciting story, producing a series of engaging vignettes of 19th- and early 20th-century Shanghai--a place of foreign buccaneers, entrepreneurs, sampan indigents on the putrid Soochow Creek, the shadowy Chinese underworld and the glitzy ostentatious life of wealth and pleasure. There is a fascinating array of characters: an ambitious hungry Chiang Kai-shek, an equally ruthless, shrewd and charismatic Chou En-lai, the policeman gangster Pockmarked Huang, and the evil godfather Du Yuesheng, who helped Chiang Kai-shek in the murderous coup against his communist partners in 1927.

Dong's breathless litany of decadence will titillate readers with tales of sneaky downtrodden servants and the colonial gluttony and arrogance that in fact characterized colonial enclaves all over the world from Bengal Bay to British Kenya to the last gasp of colonial privilege of the "Zonies" in Panama. But none of these could match Shanghai in hedonism.

In Shanghai, White Russian cossacks guarded nightclubs, blonde White Russian beauties competed with a stable of American girls who plied their trade in the Line red light district, German-Jewish intellectuals -- refugees from Hitler -- mended shoes. Out of this Jewish diaspora came Michael Blumenthal, secretary of the treasury under Carter, who said American boardrooms were a piece of cake compared to the streets of Shanghai. American admirals, generals, high rollers found the lovely cunning ladies of Shanghai irresistible, married them, and took them off to the great PX in the sky.

Dong's book does not capture bourgeois Shanghai. For instance, the Shanghai American school was as pure as they come. I know because I went there. It had all-American sports, was deeply religious, and mixed puppy love and prom dances with high academic standards. It produced extraordinary Americans like J. Stapleton Roy, career ambassador, and David Tappan, CEO of the giant construction firm Fluor.

Dong ends with Mao's new order, who in 1949 "entered carefully but resolutely the Great Chinese Metropolis," and she describes the gap between these earnest peasant soldiers of the new China and jaded, apathetic Shanghai. Under Mao, the place was radicalized, decimated; youth were shipped out, entrepreneurs committed suicide. The ghastly Cultural Revolution that tore China apart for 10 years started in Shanghai.

Today, Shanghai is booming again, prosperous, corrupt, dynamic, with lovely ladies, glittering neon signs and the rise of criminal gangs. Perhaps the final irony is the propaganda movie the Chinese put out on the liberation of Shanghai in 1949. The Bund, a broad promenade with massive Victorian stone buildings, was held up as an odious example of the worst of colonial imperialism. Today the Bund is lit up, bragged about, shown off as the epitome of the new booming Shanghai.

Shanghai will endure while the ghosts of the imperialist past and communist present recede into the mists.

James R. Lilley is a senior fellow at AEI.